Ken Greenberg speaks of lessons from pioneering global cities

I was interested to read a recent article by Ken Greenberg at urbandesignreview.org.

The article begins with the following note:

• Editor’s Note: The Forum for Urban Design is embarking on a campaign to collect ideas for compelling projects, plans, and policies to better New York City under the next mayor’s tenure. To tie in with this theme, the Urban Design Review will be featuring lessons from pioneering global cities. ‘City Government for the New Urban World’ is the second entry in this series.

The opening paragraph in Ken Greenberg’s arcticle reads:

• The 21st century city stands poised to play a critical role as a great problem solver and generator of prosperity. We are discovering that only dense cities can reduce our heavy environmental footprint and address the devastating progress of climate change. We are figuring out how to get more out of less, drawing on their inherent capacity to solve multiple problems laterally, not one at a time. And we are embracing Jane Jacobs’ profound insight that cities are not mechanical constructs, but ‘organized complexity’ better understood by analogy with the science of living organisms. But here’s the rub: while this new way of seeing the city is widely shared, we often find that we have inherited systems on auto-pilot that were designed to produce a very different kind of urban world.

Here’s an additional excerpt from the article:

• Most recently I have been working with the City of Edmonton, Alberta on two assignments: one to do with the creation of a ‘Connectivity Framework’ to track and frame the evolution of this rapidly growing city, and the other to examine how staff from different disciplines can more effectively integrate their work. At this stage in Edmonton’s evolution, things are moving much too fast for the old paradigm to cope effectively.

Ken Greenberg

The above-noted article describes Ken Greenberg as follows:

Ken Greenberg is an architect, urban designer, author, and Principal of Greenberg Consultants. He has worked for over three decades on public and private projects throughout North America and Europe, focusing on the rejuvenation of downtowns, waterfronts, neighborhoods, campus master planning, regional growth management, and new community planning. He is the author of Walking Home: the Life and Lessons of a City Builder (2011).

Toronto Island airport

Ken Greenberg has also written an article for the Jan. 9-16, 2014 issue of Now Magazine, entitled “Why Richard Florida is dead wrong about Island airport expansion: We need to open the lens a little wider to see the true devastation extending the runway at Billy Bishop would cause on the lakefront.”